LOVE YOU LIKE THE SKY

A guide to dealing with the suicide of a loved one.

In 2008, after the sudden death of her boyfriend, who threw himself in front of a train in Mountain View, California, Neustadter spiraled into seemingly hopeless depression. However, she was unwilling to inflict similar pain and despair on her own loved ones by taking her own life. Most of the self-help books that she consulted left her with the feeling of being “talked to and coached at, not joined with,” particularly as her main desire was to reconnect with the person whom she lost. In a peculiarly 21st-century response to this feeling, she began writing emails to his former Yahoo! Mail account. The result is this book, the author’s nonfiction debut, in which she groups the emails she wrote into larger categories, such as “Despair,” “Shifting,” and “Beauty,” and adds her own extensive insights on emotional crisis and personal recovery, guided by her experience as a transpersonal psychologist. The author intends her book as “a companion in grief for any survivor left behind without his or her beloved,” and she supplements her personal reflections with a section on spiritual practices and grief resources. However, the heart of the book, and its most memorable element, are the messages to the author’s late boyfriend, which effectively flesh him out as an individual and underscore the immediacy of Neustadter’s pain after losing him: “You became everyone’s favorite,” she writes in an email about their early days together. “How could we resist your white Mickey Mouse hoodie no grown man should ever wear and your big, innocent blue eyes, so light, like the sky?” This device is an effective one, and every one of Neustadter’s readers will immediately sympathize with it; that said, this particular method of grieving may not be a healthy choice for everyone.

An affecting collection of correspondence by a grieving woman seeking healing and peace.